Back in October, Google announced a rewards program that would give financial incentives for "down-to-earth, proactive improvements" to security across third-party open-source projects that Google deems "vital to the health of the entire Internet."

Starting with core infrastructure services, Chrome foundations and other "high impact libraries," Google vowed to expand the program soon. Today, in an entry to the official security blog, Google announced that the program has been expanded in scope to include open-source bits of Android, found in AOSP, and several other projects.

The first OTA update for Moto X has been making the rounds, already landing on T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T, and US Cellular. Now the enhancements are landing on Verizon devices. The delay is not at all surprising, really. When you have the best coverage in the country, you're free to take your time with these things. Verizon has all but made this philosophy corporate policy.

Google just updated the web Play Store with a completely new UI that was teased back at I/O 2013, and it immediately caused a whirlwind of mixed reactions. We have a separate post coming up on all the differences as well as the features that didn't make it into the redesign (there are, unfortunately, a lot - even more than went missing in Maps v7), but right now I want to commend Google and address one aspect that immediately stood out to me within the first few seconds - speed.

Pantech Marauder owners will soon see a software update arriving on their QWERTY-sliding handset. Verizon is pushing it out three months after the last one, ushering in another wave of general enhancements and touchups. The notification panel's status bar has been updated so that users can preview application messages directly, and a Google+ button has been added to the Calendar app so that viewers can jump directly to the social network to see event details.

It's not Jelly Bean yet. Well, I mean it is. It's the older Jelly Bean. Not the newer Jelly Bean. I'm sure this isn't confusing. However, Verizon is getting ready to roll out an update to the Galaxy S III that will bump the phone from 4.1.1 to 4.1.2. Unfortunately this isn't the 4.2 upgrade most users were likely hoping for. Among the listed improvements are a better keyboard and the ability to take pictures while on a call.

Swiftkey's new Flow beta has been a crowd-favorite since its release. The company behind one of the best Android keyboard replacement apps has pushed a new update that brings a variety of bugfixes—including a bunch of crashes—and improvements such as a nicer-looking installer, a new Turkish layout, and better punctuation prediction for non-English languages.

* Fixed crash on changing keyboards* Fixed force close on clicking update language* Fixed other crashes* Resolved majority of non-English punctuation problems* New look installer to match SwiftKey Flow colors and include an introduction to SwiftKey Flow* Added Turkish layout* Chrome Beta should now behave like Chrome* Snap and tap (correction of words) now compatible with Vietnamese* Memory usage of settings app reduced* Improved handling of non-zero length selection in Chrome and Samsung mail client* Fixed jumping cursor in ExDialler and Samsung calculator* Microphone key disabled in fields that don’t support voice input* Fix for keyboard disappearing when phone build installed on tablet sized devices* Disabled predictions in Kingsoft Office and UC browser to make SK usable in them* Double space for period turned off by default to prevent accidental period insertion when flowing* Replaced ‘learnt’ with ‘learned’ in personalization page (US English)* Turned off slide down from candidate bar to close keyboard when flow is on (to be consistent with the description in the Settings menu)

Known Issues:

* Crashes when looking at the heatmap if you visit immediately after using the alternative symbols layout* Comma key on Arabic keyboard inserts western comma* Predictions sometimes blank when switching between languages* Flowing words sometimes results in surprising capitalizations* “No SD card” ribbon looks bad on low end devices

A few months ago I wrote "Stock Android Isn't Perfect," an article where I turned my usual harsh UX critique on stock Android, instead of justpicking onTouchWiz and Sense all the time in my reviews. The article went over pretty well, and even got a few responses from Googlers! I didn't cover everything that was wrong with Android, though, and there have been a bunch of updates since the original article, so it's about time I wrote a sequel.

Remember when developers got their pre-release Ouya kits and started showing them off? In those videos, the controllers looked kinda crummy. Thankfully, the company said those were absolutely not indicative of the final design that will go out to consumers. Turns out, they really weren't! The company has detailed some changes and they sound pretty good.

For starters, the D-pad design has changed from a disconnected disc to the typical cross style that we've all gotten used to since the NES.

In a post to its "Inside Search" blog, Google announced today that several improvements are currently being rolled out to mobile search (for phones and tablets), making some of the engine's quick answers "richer, more beautiful, and more interactive."

In the recent past, users have enjoyed improvements to weather and calculator searches, with handy interactive cards (reminiscent of Google Now's visual style).

Google is now updating a heaping handful of other quick answer features including finance, currency conversion, unit conversion, dictionary definitions, local time lookup, and holiday and sunrise times.

Google's I/O conference, in usual form, kicked off with an explosive start. The day's news saw the revelation of things we've been waiting to see for months. Things we've heard rumor of, wished for, and even (quite accurately) predicted. With all the things we saw, it only seems right to round up all the day's news in one place. Grab a snack, because we've got a lot to talk about.